This week I tried two new things: astrophotography and sport fishing out on the Pacific. Two seemingly very different experiences, but they got me thinking about their curious connections — the sense of not deserving.
🌌 Astrophotography - Deep Sky Imaging #
For anyone unfamiliar: astrophotography is a different sport than visual astronomy. Visual astronomy is looking up through a telescope eyepiece, catching the white and orange bands of Jupiter or the ring of Saturn with your own eye, in real time. Astrophotography is capturing those celestial objects through long exposures, taking lots of photos, countering the earth’s rotation with a mount, and then spending at least 50% (if not more) of the time on post-processing to produce images like the ones you’d see from Hubble, James Webb, or Sky & Telescope.
It used to be extremely difficult. Steep learning curve, expensive gear. You’d haul an equatorial mount, camera, lenses, and heavy-duty tripod out to a remote dark-sky area. You’d stand in the cold and the dark, willing to wait. The next day or two you’d spend many hours processing the photos — stacking, star removal, stretching — in software like Siril that can run Python scripts as well as offer Photoshop-like capabilities. This is the stage where science and art blend. The way you process your image is an artist’s choice: you could do minimal processing with just stacking, star removal, and stretching, or you could treat it like a painting — “a painting is never done. It’s done when you decide to put down your pen.”
Nowadays, a lot has changed, thanks to the rise of smart telescopes.
At the workshop, we got to see the Seestar smart telescope. It’s about the size of Amazon Echo. You scroll through the app to choose what you want to shoot, say M42, the Orion Nebula, and it automatically aims, captures multiple 45-second exposures, then stacks, denoises, and stretches them for you. What comes out is instantly social-media-worthy.
Our instructor said he used to pack 60 pounds of gear for a single trip. Recently he brought the Seestar to Panama, which takes up less than a corner of his bag, under 2 pounds. And the quality of the images is genuinely good — he could choose to keep polishing them if he wanted, but he didn’t need to, and wasn’t burdened by having to spend extra time on post-processing.
Another astrophotographer was amazed: “I could even drink tea inside? I no longer need to wait in the dark and cold?!” Someone teased her: isn’t that part of the beauty, the romance of astrophotography? She said yes, until I’ve had enough cold, and decided that was no longer charming.
Mitch and I were impressed too. We have an 8-inch Dobsonian that we’ve taken camping twice. It’s heavy. You have to do collimation each time to get the focus right. You need to know exactly where to look, and when. You get the thrill to see the saturn’s rings but it’s really difficult to image it. The Seestar’s images were beautiful, fool-proof and unfairly easy. And somewhere underneath the astonishment was a small unease. We felt we hadn’t done anything to deserve this convenience. We hadn’t searched for it. We hadn’t learned the processing software. We hadn’t endured the cold.
🎣 Sport Fishing with The Sea Wolf #
Yesterday we got up at 4am. Our first ocean fishing trip. We boarded at 5am when the sky was still dark. Our boat was named Sea Wolf, and the captain is a Japanese American who has been running sport fishing trips for fifty years.
After we sailed out of the bay and into the Pacific, the water got noticeably choppy. The waves rose up to two meters (over 6 feet). Even though we’d both taken motion sickness pills and patches, Mitch puked once and I puked seven times. In my half-dizzy, half-conscious state, I remember thinking — those early ancestors who so confidently declared “conquer the ocean” must have been crazy. I also thought about One Piece, and confirmed: I’m definitely not built for adventuring with Luffy to search for the world’s treasure. Triple and quadruple confirmed — I’m a land mammal.
Ocean fishing was the latter for me. And that’s ok. I’m full of respect and humility for the mighty ocean, and for the people who do this for a living.
So I didn’t actually spend much time fishing, because my body decided to go into energy-saving mode for the second half. But even in the short windows I stood next to my pole, I pulled up four rockfish! What’s so crazy is that I caught them all using a single piece of calamari! Mitch got twelve in total. In fact, everyone on the boat caught fish!
Mitch said: “This feels like the smart telescope. I feel like I haven’t earned it.”
I feel the same. I thought fishing was about patient waiting. But this is different: you put on the bait, drop the line, release the thread, wait 45 seconds or a minute, reel back. About 80% of the time, there’s a fish on the hook.
It reminded me of Gary Halbert’s idea
where should you open a hot-dog (or burger) stand? Where there are hungry people.
To be fair, the reason fishing looked so easy was that the captain and the crew knew exactly where to go, and what bait to use for which kind of fish. When you drop your bait into a spot full of hungry fish, of course you have a higher chance of catching them. It almost felt like cheating. The sense of not deserving.
🧐 Where does the sense of deservingness come from? #
Another curious connection is how AI-generated music, artwork, and code make us feel. Having AI generate music in the style of Joe Hisaishi, or images in the style of Ghibli, definitely arouses the sense of not deserving. It can even feel disrespectful and immoral to do so.
But I don’t have that feeling when it comes to AI-generated code. I haven’t written code by myself for a while. I use AI almost daily, with multiple worktrees, for both work and personal projects. And I don’t have a sense of not deserving.
Why the difference?
Maybe because I did go through the traditional route. I suffered the hours of being a lousy beginner — from not even knowing how to open a PR, to the phase of knowing where to search and when to ask for help, to the point of having the confidence that almost every problem has a moment of breaking out of the woods. Not because I’m smart, because I am aware that I’m not that unique. Whatever I’m working on, whatever problem I’m facing, there’s a good chance someone has encounterd it too and probably already figured it out a decent solution.
Maybe Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule is about this:
That’s what makes you feel you deserve the convenience and ease that technology brings.
That being said, I don’t think we need to earn deservingness for every activity we do. As this new adventure of fishing taught me, knowing thy limits is also a gift. For things you care about, you probably should spend enough time to experience the highs and lows, the ebbs and flows. But for things you don’t have talent for, or aren’t apt to pursue, knowing that other people have spent the effort and time, and cultivating a sense of appreciation — that’s also a good route.